Computer geeks - what could be wrong with my wifi card?

In My Humble Opinion
1

After my move, I had to use my wifi card to connect to the net. It worked for a little bit, and then quit. After much effort, it was discovered that uninstalling the card and reinstalling it “fixed” the problem. It then quit working again, and reinstalling it worked again, but only for a short time.

Now it only works for about 20 minutes after booting, and then it doesn’t receive any more packets. The yellow balloon comes out of the system tray, saying that there are networks to connect to, but when you connect to them, it just prompts the balloon again, saying that there are networks to connect to. This happens over and over, and after it starts, you don’t connect in reality again.

I even bought a new card, and then I even installed it in a different PCI slot, but the same problem keeps happening. I’m about to reinstall Windows XP completely to see if that works, but it’s so much of a pain that I’m hoping to get around it.

Any ideas of what I might try after all this? My computer-store employee friend is even out of ideas.

2

I don’t know the answer to your question — but I can tell you that I also had a finicky wireless card/computer combination. It would kick me off or log on but refuse to grant me access to its internet.

My solution? Nothing that a series of the following couldn’t cure:

(1) easy - repair the wireless
(2) medium - eject and reinsert the wireless card
(3) hard - reboot computer
(4) pain in the ass - full scale shut down and then reboot

Usually I would get a psychic sense of which level of intensity was needed (meaning I would guess) from simply repairing to shutting down and restarting the whole thing. No real rhyme or reason to the thing either.

Maybe you could try some of these steps to see if it will temporarily resolve your issues. I sympathize - wireless issues are the damndest things.

3

It sounds like a power problem. PCMCIA cards eat power and so some systems will shut them off when not in use. Of course “not in use” is a suspect term in the eyes of WinXP.

I don’t have a PCMCIA card to dig for you, but see if you can find a setting for the card that has to do with power options.

4

I would suspect that if the problem happens with a new card, the problem isn’t the card it’s the router.

I had the exact same problem - it was happening simultaneously on my desktop and my laptop. Went and got a new router and it was all dandy.

Now…if you are connecting to some router that isn’t yours (community WiFi, school WiFi, etc) then I am off base with my answer.

5

Looking back on this, I don’t know why I thought this was a PCMCIA card. I think I was reading two things at once.

Ignore what I said.